Instrumental variables matter: towards causal inference using deep learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Causal inference requires knowing causal connections between treatment and outcome variables, and DeepIV, a causal inference framework, is the pioneer work to predict such connections by crossing deep learning with causal inference in applying instrumental variables(IVs) to deep neural network. DeepIV has been proved to be one of the best methods in this field theoretically, but how the framework performs on real-life problems still remains unclear. This paper provides an implementation of DeepIV, and use the framework to predict causal effect from people’s educational background on their annual income. DeepIV framework allows us to take advantage of neural network to estimate causal effect by adjusting loss function. To evaluate the performace of DeepIV in solving real-life problems, our experiment is based on real datasets. The result of our experiment shows that DeepIV’s ability to predict causal effect on real data is at least as good as those of other casual inference models’ whose reliability has been verified in practice. Meanwhile, DeepIV does not have obvious shortcoming in predicting outcomes compared with other supervised learning methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".